San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Acolorful salute to style icon, UT professor, 99
Iris Apfel calls herself an accidental icon, but her fans might say otherwise.
Her style, personality and those oversize glasses are so iconic, it seems she was put on this earth to make the world a more colorful and stylish place.
“I nevermet a color I didn’t like,” she says.
So a coloring book in her honor seems right.
The new “Iris: The Coloring Book” (University of Texas at Austin School of Human Ecology, $45) recently debuted and features the geriatric starlet with illustrations of her fromchildhood through adulthood, including life with her late husband, Carl Apfel.
The couple started OldWorld Weavers, an international fabricmanufacturing company, that provided fabrics for the White House, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and many celebrities.
Apfel has been lauded with an exhibit at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, has had Barbie made in her likeness, developed a limited-edition collection ofmakeup for M.A.C. cosmetics and created a jewelry line that she sold on the Home Shopping Network. The documentary “Iris,” about her life, earned an Emmy nomination.
The “Iris” coloring book benefits the UT in NYC program, for which Apfel serves as a visiting professor. Each year, she hosts a group of UT students in New York and shows them some of the fashion industry’s biggest designer studios and showrooms, from Donna Karan to Naeem Khan.
“Iris is the most colorful person,” said Nancy Prideaux, program director for UT in NYC. “The students learn fromher that the industry is somuch broader. And she can get us into Tommy Hilfiger’s studio, and he actually appears.”
We talked with Apfel, who turned 99 in August, fromher
Palm Beach, Fla.
Q: How does it feel to be immortalized in a coloring book?
A: I was very, very surprised. I didn’t think it would be such a good idea, but evidently it was. There was a surge a few years ago of coloring books and everybody was coloring, but then it dropped dead. I didn’t think people would be interested, but that surely isn’t the case. We seem to have a lot of overseas people buying them, andmore people here are wanting one.
Q: As a professor with the University of Texas programin